Repeal-and-replace bill dead in Senate

An auto insurance repeal-and-replace bill barely has a pulse, just days before the Florida Legislature’s 2018 session is scheduled to end.

But can it rise again in the waning days?

Prospects look slim for reviving Sen. Tom Lee’s bid to repeal Florida’s decades-old $10,000 Personal Injury Protection (PIP) coverage requirement and replace it with a requirement that motorists buy liability and medical payments coverage, legislators said after a Senate panel voted 6-1 not to advance the bill on Wednesday.

Reviving the bill before the March 9 end of the session would be a “heavy lift,” Lee said after the vote. Legislature’s

Sen. Anitere Flores, R-Miami, who kept the bill on life support with a procedural motion to “temporarily postpone” it, said she doubts it’s coming back.

“There are several hurdles people could jump through to bring the bill back, but it’s probably impossible,” Flores said by phone after the hearing.

The auto insurance industry, which opposes the repeal bill as a boon to trial attorneys, isn’t dropping its guard just yet.

Wednesday’s vote of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Health and Human Services “was a positive development, but the bill is not dead yet,” said Michael Carlson, president of the Personal Insurance Federation of Florida, which represents several major auto insurers. “We hope that it’s not resurrected. We know that proponents will try [before the session ends] to move it to the Senate floor, however.”

The near-fatal blow to the bill followed a messy debate Wednesday that pitted insurers and their supporters against plaintiffs attorneys and their supporters.

Before this year’s session, the Florida Justice Association, a trade group of plaintiffs attorneys, identified no-fault repeal as one of its top legislative priorities.

The attorneys’ group said the state had a “moral imperative” to repeal the law that requires drivers to buy minimum coverage for their own injuries, in place since 1979, and revert to a traditional system in which at-fault